Fueling evidence-based decision making at British Gas

British Gas maximizes resources and impact by leveraging UserZoom to test at the pace of business—ensuring design decisions are born from data, not opinions.

Keep reading for more details from our interview with James Sutton, UX Researcher at British Gas.

How has UserZoom helped you succeed at British Gas? 

I’m a UX Researcher at British Gas—the largest gas and electricity provider in the United Kingdom. 

I have over five years of experience using UserZoom. Being a long-term UserZoom Advocate has helped me hit the ground running from a testing perspective and helps me support and challenge the methods or approaches used during studies. 

Although the industry was new to me, user research as a whole wasn't, and I could apply these methods to a different industry immediately.

What are you trying to overcome or achieve with UX Research?

Today customers are more aware than ever of what they like and dislike, especially from a digital perspective. So my vision for British Gas is to make UX Research an integral part of every design decision and to evolve that across the teams. And also to get more people within the team to test at pace and to provide evidence-based research to help form business decisions moving forward.

Some of the tactical pain points and challenges that UserZoom helps us resolve—when we have two designs, and we’re not quite sure which way to go, it gives us the ability to evaluate and challenge the initial design. It also helps us identify issues that we were unaware of. Which I think is fundamental and very important.

It allows us to test things before going to build, which can save on development costs or having to rework unusable features or ones that need streamlining or improvement at a future date. It's that ability to catch high-risk opportunities before going live and fix those before launch.

How does your team use UserZoom?

UserZoom allows us to talk to our customers directly, both current and prospective, and evaluate our work. In one case that comes to mind, we were able to challenge a proposal in a journey and make quick changes that removed three or four clicks!

We use a range of different features - we are very well-versed in using unmoderated studies, and within that, we use surveys, card sorting, and tree testing. From a site hierarchy point of view, it helps provide quick and rapid validation. The moderated study is the other method we like to use from the platform. It has been a lifesaver to do moderated studies remotely where previously they would've been done in lab sessions.

What are some of the benefits of UserZoom?

The biggest benefit of using UserZoom is that we're able to evaluate our design proposals quickly and can then retest those proposals at pace - saving a lot of time on development. Five or six years ago, under traditional methods, it would have taken longer to get those results. A robust platform like UserZoom has enabled us to remove the opinion from projects we're working on.

But it’s not just about the rapid insight we get but also about removing the need to go into physical buildings to run testing. Previously we would have to work through a lab or a different agency, and it would not be easy to get everybody within the same location. With UserZoom, we can run a moderated session and fire out the links to multiple stakeholders who can join that session.

I think what makes UserZoom different in this competitive market is its wide variety of methods and ability to integrate different methods within single studies to ensure we get the most effective outputs and results from studies we run.